Here are some things that happen when a colleague falls ill.

A jolt ripples through the office, as word spreads that out of the blue, your coworker, your friend, who's never been a smoker or a coal miner or an asbestos worker, discovers that cancer has stormed her lungs and spread throughout her body. Flowers get sent, cards handpicked to suit her sensibilities, while quiet conversations by the coffee machine and around desks probe a complex mix of feelings.

It's disquieting, her sudden disappearance from the usual routine, one day here dashing together a salad for lunch on the fly, the next gone to a world you can only dimly imagine of doctors and drugs and fear. Your small team is now minus one star, and there's a reluctant understanding that the show must go on, magazines must go to press, and somehow you have to do it without her.

In the course of the passing days, her office sits open as if she's stepped out for a latte, the room cheerful and patiently empty in the robin's egg blue she chose when she came to the company. A flipchart from a meeting with her staff bears her handwriting still, alive with attitude, notes that speak to her unusual gift for inspiration, even when in doubt (We're going to sell that how?). These things loom large in her absence, and you wonder how you'll ever replace her, as she is of the rare breed that doesn't come do a job but creates it every day, providing a vision and an endless supply of ideas to feed it.

Her absence has a grip on the place even after weeks have passed since her diagnosis, leaving you waiting, hoping for a word or a signal that soon she will be back and it will be business as usual, and you'll be able to pass one another in the hallway with looks that say "whew -- I'm so glad that's behind us."

So when word comes that your colleague died in the night, though you knew the odds, the news is stunning, and you find you don't quite know what to do, and no one else does, either. You are not nurses or doctors here, people experienced in death, but just a bunch of regular people, and this is not like other work predicaments that can be smoothed over with brilliant thinking or elbow grease.

Even while you grieve there is the need to make decisions, and so they get made -- that AutoReply will answer routine e-mails, that it's time now to put the contents of her desk into a box for her husband and baby boy, that her name will no longer appear in the masthead of this magazine.

Gradually, sensibilities return to the work at hand, but things have changed over the months -- people have stepped up, new synergies have emerged, and it seems, maybe, that everyone is treating each other with a little more care.

You come to understand that on the dark cloud that is your friend's death, the mark she's left at every turn and the pleasure of her memory are the silver lining.

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Copyright 2003 Oregon Business magazine